Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method to provide assistance to agents of an enterprise and particularly to a system and method for guiding agents of the enterprise to handle incoming contacts.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service, inbound and outbound contacts or customers. A primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency usage of its available resources. The contact center efficiency is generally measured by metrics such as Service Level Agreement (SLA), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and match rate. Contact center resources may include, agents, communication assets (e.g., number of voice trunks, number and bandwidth of video trunks, etc.), computing resources (e.g., a speed, a queue length, a storage space, etc.), and so forth.
Service level is one measurement of the contact center efficiency. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within a specified period by the number accepted plus number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, canceled, flowed out). Service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is another indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent in a queue over the same period. An agent with a primary skill level is one who typically may handle contacts of a certain nature more effectively and/or efficiently as compared to an agent of lesser skill level. There are other contact center agents who may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically handled more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent. Thus, it is an objective of most contact centers to optimize match rate along with the service level.
In addition to service level and match rate performance measures, contact centers use other Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”), such as revenue, estimated, actual, or predicted wait time, average speed of answer, throughput, agent utilization, agent performance, agent responsiveness and the like, to calculate performance relative to their Service Level Agreements (“SLAs”). Operational efficiency is achieved when the KPIs are managed near, but not above, SLA threshold levels.
Throughput is a measure of the number of contacts/contact requests or work requests that may be processed in a given amount of time. Agent utilization is a measure of how efficiently the agents' time is being used. Customer service level is a measure of the time customers spend waiting for their work to be handled. Company contact center customers wish to provide service to as many requests as possible in a given amount of time, using the least number of agents to do so, and minimizing the wait time for their customers that may increase the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the contact center. Further, the contact center may also have to maintain the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics in order to maintain the KPIs of the contact center. For this purpose, agents may have to maintain the quality of services provided to the customers through multimedia (e.g., voice contacts, video contacts, emails, etc.).
Generally, in a contact center, when a customer makes a call, for example, through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Unit, the call is routed to an agent based on the customer's input. The agent is selected based on some parameters, for example, an agent's skill, a type of call, a customer's preferred language, etc. Further, the agent is then provided with customer information received from the customer's input and a predefined script. The agent may have to strictly follow the script in order to provide services to the customer and also to maintain the service level agreement of the contact center.
However, the information provided to the customer is, sometimes, incomplete and conventional techniques do not provide provisions to tailor or modify these predefined agent's scripts. Further, custom tailoring of these predefined agent scripts is limited to static mappings of skills of agents, a Variable Directing Number (VDN), a Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS), etc. to desired statically defined phrases. The VDN is a route point inside the contact center, which receives incoming work requests. For example, incoming work requests related to the sale of health insurance policies may route to a route point A and incoming work requests related to complaints of car insurance may route to another routing point B. The DNIS is a number that a customer or a potential customer dials to reach an agent of the contact center and based on the number the agent knows some information associated with the customer.
Further, the agents of the contact center may optimize the predefined scripts to provide services to gold rated customers, i.e., customers having higher revenue products/services of the contact center. However, it is a complex and cumbersome process to optimize the predefined agent's scripts. Further, conventional systems do not provide techniques to validate content of scripts provided to the agents. For example, there is no way to verify whether content of a script provided to an agent is utilized by the agent or not during a communication session with a customer.
There is thus a need for a system and method for guiding agents of an enterprise to improve dynamically handling of incoming contacts.